Alibaba is one of several Chinese companies reported to have ordered AI chips from Nvidia.
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Alibaba
has upgraded its artificial-intelligence model, the company said Tuesday. Chinese technology firms continue to claim significant advances in AI, despite U.S. efforts to restrict their access to advanced chips.
Alibaba
Group Holding (ticker: BABA) said the newest version of its Tongyi Qianwen AI model has several hundred billion parameters—a measure of complexity—and is a major upgrade from its predecessor, which was launched in April.
Chinese tech companies are racing for AI dominance, just like their American peers. Search-engine company
Baidu
(BIDU) recently said its latest AI model is a match for that developed by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
The U.S. aims to curb Chinese development of AI systems by limiting exports of advanced chips, such as those produced by
Nvidia
(NVDA). A recent tightening of restrictions has put nearly $5 billion in orders for Nvidia’s chips from Chinese companies—including Alibaba, TikTok-owner ByteDance, and
Baidu
—in limbo, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Alibaba didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Analysts at CreditSights wrote in a recent research note that advanced AI chips aren’t widely used in the core businesses of Chinese internet companies such as Alibaba and
JD.com
(JD), but U.S. restrictions could hurt their development over the medium to long-term.
China’s “internet giants have likely stockpiled some Nvidia A800/H800 GPUs for generative AI R&D, based on our recent conversations with a few, but it is unclear how big the existing stocks are and how long they can last,” the CreditSights analysts wrote.
Alibaba’s cloud unit offers clients the use of a range of AI models as well as its own. Earlier this year, it said it would provide access to a model developed by
Facebook
-owner Meta Platforms (META). Alibaba said 80% of China’s technology companies run on Alibaba Cloud.
“We aim to be the most open cloud in the era of AI. We hope that through this cloud, it will become easier and affordable for everyone to develop and use AI,” Joe Tsai, chairman of Alibaba, said Tuesday during a speech at a company event.
American depositary receipts of Alibaba were down 1.5% in premarket trading on Tuesday. Baidu ADRs were down 1.3%.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
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